design leadership

On Monday 11 November I deliver a lecture to Master of Design for Services and MSc Design Ethnography students entitled Design Leadership: Time for New Perspectives for the Strategic Design Thinking module. This post provides students with further resources to explore themes raised in the lecture.

Two books are critical. The first is The Handbook of Design Management, edited by Rachel Cooper, Sabine Junginger, Thomas Lockwood. This provides some excellent well researched perspectives from corporate design management. The emphasis here is in examining those factors that determine design’s leadership role in the corporate environment. The second book is Design Transitions by Joyce Yee, Emma Jefferies and Lauren Tan. This book looks at contemporary design practices, with a particular emphasis on service/social design, and current design thinking, based on profiles of companies and interviews with specialists. One of its many unique aspects is the truly global span that it achieves in terms of its research and analysis. It is also written in an accessible style while embracing a range of issues and developments. Design Transitions is an essential read for all students and practitioners of design. There is a website for the book, and an older site set up to document the process of researching and writing it, and which has a few of the interviews and profiles in the book on it (including mine).

Aside from chapters in these two volumes I also refer to the following:

Richard Farson: Leadership is the key issue, the full text is available here.

Design 20?0 The Future of the UK Design Industry – An investigation into the threats and opportunities for the UK design industry over the next 10 to 15 years by Rachel Cooper, Martyn Evans & Alex Williams. This is an excellent research report on possible futures for the consultancy sector.

Since this lecture is the opening talk in a module entitled Strategic Design Thinking, then one has to bite the bullet and define what design thinking is. I haven’t much to add on this issue to what I’ve already posted here, when assembling my ideas for a talk at EURIB in Rotterdam during 2012. This emphasised the importance of Nigel Cross to any discussion on this theme, and ended with the following:

While design thinking can be applied by managers, communities, users and others to think creatively through problems in a variety of states of ‘wickedness’ this does not remove the need for critically engaged, reflexive professional designers. Indeed it creates a far greater demand for them to act as facilitators, leaders and enablers. They bring the specialist knowledge and ‘feeling’ that is rooted in the aesthetics and craft of design, without which design is ethically unmoored, and creatively soulless.

The ‘twitter poll’ I refer to in the lecture is described more fully in an earlier post. In part this post was focussing on the shortcomings of the design management literature in adequately exploring design leadership as a properly inclusive concept. Towards the end I write this:

Design leadership is fundamentally about empowerment, it is about vision, driving change through design in the wider world, and is about the primacy of values. We find it in the corporate world, and we find it in the community. Design leadership helps us to create iPhones, and it helps us to create and sustain knitting groups. We see design leadership in start ups and in schools where teachers empower their pupils to learn and to gain self-respect through design and technology. Design leadership is about focussed determination. And it is about empathy, emotional intelligence, honesty and the primacy of others. Not ego. Design leadership is practiced by women and men, of indeterminate ethnicity, of all social classes. It is exemplified by amateurs, activists and professionals. So to define such a concept through a partial and selective perspective evident in some current design management thinking is at best flawed.

I still stand by this. However, after posting that I had some very encouraging feedback, which led me to write a further post – less critical and more positive in its outlook: the craft of design leadership. It concludes: “Tomorrow’s design leader is a resourceful social expert, who crafts change co-operatively.”

I have a problem with design management. I have never really been able to put my finger on it in a decisive way. But today I came closer.

Next week I will be lecturing in Rotterdam to postgraduate students on the excellent EURIB Masters course on design management. My theme is design leadership. This is an established field of inquiry and practice, but has been defined largely by the corporate concerns of management. I have less interest in this than the broader and more challenging question of design leadership in social design, the community and in the new ‘indie capitalist’ start-up culture.

However, there is a literature out there that explores definitions, interpretations and challenges of leadership in design – much of it based on extensive research – which I have been picking the bones out of.

The definitions that exist in the design management literature simply do not fit the new world of practice that many designers find themselves in today. So I decided to crowdsource some definitions. I tweeted: Tell me in a tweet: how do you define #designleadership?

What was sent to me in just a few hours were some great insights and interpretations, few if any fitting the conventional idea of design leadership. This is hardly surprising since design leadership is part of only very few individuals’ daily discourse. But it has certainly opened up some interesting themes to explore in Rotterdam and to write about more fully over the summer. I have clustered the responses fairly broadly. Some obviously fit under a number of clusters, but here we go.

Project management

These definitions focus on critical competencies in getting projects done well. Design leaders, it is perhaps inferred, are excellent, pragmatic and efficient managers and practitioners.

@Doubleyouvee – someone who allows me 2 explore the boundaries of a brief but tells me to reel my neck in at the right time.

@First_Angle – design leadership is the ability to take control of a project & clearly portray the end result the client needs without issue

@Clearmapping – Compassion for those who pull off the all-nighters to deliver on time! *Usually day-in, day-out! : )

@FahdMSA – Design leadership is providing your creative ones with an open space in the right direction.

@cjarnold – #designleadership… the concerted act of framing, facilitating, and delivering on the promise of pragmatic creativity.

Strategy

Given the textbook definitions – which focus exclusively on the strategic role of design leadership – I had expected to see a few more of these. I have included the @wearesnook response here as it accords with one view of strategic leadership which focuses on the ‘designerly approach to solving problems’.

@DivaDesign – Design leaders are the Sherpas on the mountain of communication

@StuartUnited – By asking why all the time while dressed in black.

Vision, values and determination

Seeing a vision, holding on to values in the face of adversity and removing ego as you lead are the issues here. Putting others first, such as users, seems to be linked to this idea of leading with less ego.

@FDalmau – #designleadership is the capacity of transferring what only your eyes can see to the rest of humanity.

@craftfair – Sticking to your values under economic pressure.

@rbsquarebanana – Leading by example, without an egotistical bent.

@fwalasdair – putting the user / customer at the core of the organisation

Change in the world (not just business)

These two definitions focus on leading change, and in one case specifically regarding social change.

@alamaffan – be an agent of change.

@CharlotteGorse – #designleadership is helping to activate social change for the better, connecting likeminds in a common purpose

Empowerment

In the definitive Handbook of Design Management (in which I am one of many contributors) empowerment is not even in the index. This term comes from psychology and philosophy, and has a close association with feminism.

@EmmaWalkerCEO – Creating space to empower new opportunity and vision.

@jaycousins – #designleadership is empowering people to take the lead, so they can improve the world for themselves and others.

To be honest, my twitter experiment had given me more inspiration and ideas to mull over than three days of poring over all the literature and research. So why is this?

My contributor @joannasaurusrex has a vital insight. I asked her why female, and she replied: “because women are more emotive – and both good design and good leadership should have a mixture of structure and feeling”.

Much of the literature in design management and design leadership is based on studies of men. Actually, a very specific type of man – a white male designer who works for a large corporation. I have nothing against these people at all. Some of them indeed are my best friends. It is just that basing an entire academic and professional discipline around a really rather small section of humanity is somewhat questionable.

In an influential and highly well argued paper, The Soul of Design Leadership, a number of examples are used to define the essence of design leadership. And they are: Philippe Picaud, former design director of Decathlon; Thorsten Bjørn, senior creative director for LEGO; Chris Bangle, former design director of BMW Group; Chris Hacker, former design director of Aveda; Chuck Jones, former design director of Whirlpool; Stefano Marzano, CDO of Philips Electronics; Steve Jobs and Jonathan Ive of Apple. Can you see a pattern here?

Or how about this, another paper on this same theme that lists Jonathan Ive, Bill Moggridge, Chris Bangle, Terence Conran, Tim Brown, Philippe Starck, Patrick Whitney, John Thackara and a few others. I guess you get my drift.

It is not as if we are short of women who work in corporate design or who are highly influential in design: design leaders such as Vivienne Westwood, curators and journalists such as Helen Walters and Alice Rawsthorn, designer/researchers like Helen Storey. But they do not feature as exemplars in the corporate-focussed literature.

A new vision of leadership

We can link this issue to the general crisis of leadership that is now evident in our culture. I have written about this in the context of politics elsewhere in this blog. There is a general failure of leadership in the political, corporate and civic worlds. I would suggest that this failure can be directly attributed to redundant values that are rooted in conventional power relationships, such as patriarchy.

Thankfully there are alternative values evident in the new generation of leaders, and it is these that need to be embraced, nurtured and – dare I say – empowered. UpRising is a leadership programme and a venture launched and developed by the Young Foundation to support and train a new generation of public leaders, aiming to open pathways to leadership for talented young adults. In a survey of UpRisers, people were asked to identify the three most important values/attributes for a leader to have. The UpRisers chose putting community first (44%), emotional intelligence (43%), and commitment and determination (38%). To quote from the UpRiser report:

“When asked what is lacking in leadership, the general public cited honesty (55%), integrity (46%), and emotional intelligence (40%). UpRisers however chose emotional intelligence, honesty, and putting community first as their three top choices. These results indicate that people do know what they are looking for: a new model of leadership that is absent from current British power structures.”

My theory is that there is a wholly new set of values, qualities and practices emerging from a new generation of leaders (in design and elsewhere) and these are evident from my highly unscientific twitter survey. So, let me pull this together and suggest a provisional conclusion.

Design leadership is fundamentally about empowerment, it is about vision, driving change through design in the wider world, and is about the primacy of values. We find it in the corporate world, and we find it in the community. Design leadership helps us to create iPhones, and it helps us to create and sustain knitting groups. We see design leadership in start ups and in schools where teachers empower their pupils to learn and to gain self-respect through design and technology. Design leadership is about focussed determination. And it is about empathy, emotional intelligence, honesty and the primacy of others. Not ego.

Design leadership is practiced by women and men, of indeterminate ethnicity, of all social classes. It is exemplified by amateurs, activists and professionals. So to define such a concept through a partial and selective perspective evident in some current design management thinking is at best flawed.

Does this matter? Well, on one level no, not at all. One of my respondents who I consider to be a remarkable and visionary design leader tweeted in reply to my thanks for taking part to say “You’re welcome, never heard the term till today to be honest.” If anything, that is a far more pressing problem to address: the failure of this research and literature to connect with its professional constituency. But perhaps it is time to initiate a discussion about design leadership with this new generation of leaders.

@jaycousins @EmmaWalkerCEO @wearesnook @joannasaurusrex @vanillainkUK who contributed, are exemplary design leaders. I’m sure the others are too – I just don’t actually know them! So thanks to them all.